Word: altos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Here is the kind of scene that probably won't be discussed before the President's advisory board on race relations: in California's working-class town of East Palo Alto, a group of Hispanic parents went before the black-controlled school board last April to demand better bilingual education for their children. Before the meeting ended, police had to be called in to break up a fight between two participants: one a Latina and the other an African-American woman who had told her to "go back to Mexico...
...competing claims of white vs. African-American students: Who should be bused where? Or, how many dead white males should crowd the curriculum? But the newest racial flash point in schools in many parts of the U.S. pits Hispanic parents against African-American ones. The disputes like East Palo Alto's arise in part from frustration over how to spend the dwindling pot of cash in low-income districts. But they also reflect a jostling for power, as blacks who labored hard to earn a place in central offices, on school boards and in classrooms confront a Latino population eager...
...East Palo Alto blacks made up 85% of the student population a decade ago; today almost 70% of the 5,000 students are Latino. But while the composition of the schools has changed, the composition of the people who run them has not. A black woman, Charlie Mae Knight, has served as superintendent for the past 11 years; the five-person school board has just one Hispanic member; and only one of the district's school principals is Latino. Says David Giles, a lawyer who represents East Palo Alto's Latino parents in their battles with the district: "African Americans...
Invariably, the issue that drives Hispanic parents into local school politics is bilingual education. In East Palo Alto Latino parents filed a complaint with the state earlier this year demanding that the school district provide English-deficient kids with general instruction in Spanish along with daily English lessons. Says parent Sergio Sanchez: "[The administration] always says yes, yes; they promise to do things, but they never change. We need a new face in there." Many of the city's blacks, for their part, don't see the value--and resent the cost--of bilingual education. "If they want to learn...
...another demonstration of questionable judgment surfaces in the character of the Sorceress, who takes on the role which the gods held in the classical story of Virgil's Aeneid. This part, an alto role traditionally assigned to female singers, is performed by a male student, Christopher Thorpe '98, who someone must have decided was a counter-tenor of some sort. However, all of his lines sounded as if they were sung in a bad falsetto. The odd effect was emphasized by a very strange makeup job which made Thorpe's Sorcerer seem not like something supernatural or frightening but merely...